


Easy Route

by VanishingPoint



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ben is MVP, Diego is trying his best, Drug Withdrawal, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, So is Five, Substance Abuse, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-09
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2019-11-14 07:02:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18047810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VanishingPoint/pseuds/VanishingPoint
Summary: Before the end of the world, before the rewind, before the attack on the house — What if Klaus and Five had chatted for just a little bit longer?





	1. An Extra Conversation

Years back, when Klaus had been picked up for possession for the third or fourth time, the old man didn’t even bother coming to meet the cops at the door.

That suited Klaus just fine.

Luthor answered the door instead. Klaus wasn’t such a big fan of that part. Luther wasn’t too bad most of the time, but the moment things didn’t go his way, all of that leadership training, all those conflict resolution skills tended to fly right out the window.

“What’s gonna get through to you?” Luther had said, once he’d finished shaking Klaus hard enough to make his teeth rattle.

Klaus, who had just recently discovered heroin and was enjoying it just about as thoroughly as a person can enjoy a thing, was still a little high at the time. He couldn’t really feel his teeth rattling, and and he’d laughed until Luther let go of him, and then he’d laughed a little more and said, “You owe me a new shirt,” and touched the torn collar of his pale pink button-down. “Or, Allison actually. You owe her a new shirt.” He knew that Luther was probably going to grab him and shake him again, but didn’t really have the motivation to step out of reach.

“You think you can just take the easy route for the rest of your life?” Luther had said, and did in fact shake him a little more, and then let go with and shoved away when Klaus kicked him in the shin with the sharp toe of his heeled boot.

Klaus had laughed about it with Ben afterward. Or, he’d laughed, and Ben hadn’t, but at least he had the decency not to call it out when the laughter turned a little teary.

Easy route? Shit, he didn’t know where that was, but he knew he wasn’t on it.

#

Klaus lit a cigarette and inhaled while he planned his next move. He was coming down from some ecstasy he’d gotten while dancing up on a guy with pupils so dilated that it had been impossible to tell what color they were. He’d also had fabulous neon green gauges the size of gatorade bottle caps. They’d switched shirts. Or, maybe the guy had stolen Klaus’s shirt, and then that meant that Klaus wasn’t sure how he’d ended up in _this_ shirt. He definitely hadn’t started his day wearing this mesh black top.

At the moment, he was getting dangerously sober. He didn’t have another dose lined up yet, and that had him more than a little on edge. He usually liked to keep a couple of doses ahead, or at least have a plan for who he was going to cozy up to or what he was going to steal.

Because staying high took planning. Effort. Adaptability. All of the qualities that Dad had so rigorously drilled, proving useful at last. Because a dose of something—heroin, say—only lasted for so long before it started wearing off. And long before he was actually stone-cold sober, he usually started to see flashes of faces in the edges of his vision, clips of voices, whispers of his name.

So, he had to take big enough doses to block all of that bullshit, and he had to take them often enough to achieve the desired effect, but not so much that he woke up in an ambulance with a big vial of fuck-you-Naloxone in his system, sober as the day he was born. And, on top of getting the right dose and the right timing, he had to switch up drugs pretty consistently, or his tolerance built up enough that the ghosts started coming through anyway. And drugs cost money. And were illegal. And often brought him in contact with the kind of people who couldn’t be trusted not to, well, steal the shirt right off his back.

“Klaus,” Ben said.

Klaus’s chin jerked, but he managed to keep from snapping around to look. When a spirit said his name, it was like a splash of cold water. Didn’t matter whose ghost it was. Klaus could pretend he didn’t hear them, he could refuse to look at them, but they instantly had his entire attention with that single syllable. _Klaus._

“Hey, Ben,” he said, talking around the cigarette. He fingered the hem of the mesh top and pursed his lips. “You happen to see where my shirt went?”

Ben hummed. “You traded it to that guy for the E. He liked the colors.”

“Oh. That’s right,” Klaus said, although he didn’t remember that at all, and that still didn’t really answer the question of the new shirt. “Anyway, what’s up? I thought things were going okay.”

As a general rule, if Klaus was high, Ben tended to only speak up when Klaus was really having a rough time. He’d talk shit while Klaus vomited in an alleyway, try to get him to laugh when he was crying, and hiss approval when Klaus’s elbow connected with the cheek of some asshole who’d seen the skirt and the eyeliner and mistaken him for an easy target.

But otherwise, Ben often just--hung around. Occasionally he’d request things—a walk through the park or a certain song. Sometimes he wouldn’t even manifest, if Klaus was really strung out. He said that he couldn’t watch Klaus keep making the same mistakes, but Klaus was pretty sure he just got bored and went to go find someone better to haunt. It couldn’t be that interesting to sit around and watch Klaus slowly make his way through a Big Mac in a bus stop at 2AM, or waiting around while he blankly watched Say Yes to the Dress on some ex’s stolen Netflix account in a smoky motel room for the third day in a row.

“You need to go home,” Ben said.

Klaus took another long inhale and released it. He plucked the cigarette from his mouth and bent his head back to watch the smoke swirl through the yellow light of the streetlamp. “I’m not sure you’ve really—” His head was fuzzy. “—grasped the definition of homeless. Homeless—ness.”

“You know that’s not what I mean.”

“I mean, that’s really pretty terrible to say, when you think about it,” Klaus continued. “Like telling a hungry person to make a sandwich or… I don’t know, that doesn’t actually work that great as a comparison, but you know what I—”

“Dad’s dead,” Ben said.

Klaus dropped his cigarette. It sputtered on the wet pavement until he ground it out with the toe of his boot. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” Ben said.

Klaus sighed. “Should have known the old bastard wouldn’t have the decency to come tell me himself,” he said, and went to go find some heroin.

#

He did go home eventually—after a quick OD, a short stint in an ambulance, and a somewhat-sneaky stagger out a side entrance of the ER before anybody really had a chance to grill him for name and insurance.

He lay on the couch and picked at his nail polish.

Ben was gone. Again. Angry about the whole OD thing probably. Which wasn’t really Klaus’s fault. It had just been so funny once he got the first dose in, to think of Dear Old Dad being such a prick that he wouldn’t even attempt a good old ghostly farewell—but then he’d realized that Ben was still crouched next to him with his forehead all wrinkled and that he obviously was still too sober if he could see anyone at all and that while he might be angry that Dad hadn’t contacted him, he sure as fuck didn’t want him to _actually_ contact him, the scary old bastard, and next thing he knew he had the needle in his arm again and he couldn’t remember how much he’d put in it but he’d pushed the plunger anyway.

“Sorry, Ben,” he muttered. OD-ing wasn’t entirely uncommon for him. Not that it was common either, but at this point he suspected he might be just a little bit resistant to death. Not death-proof or anything. Just a little better at stepping over the line, and then hopping back without too much fuss.

In the absence of Ben, Klaus took a few puffs of a cannabis vape that he found in Allison’s purse—didn’t she know the courts would bar her from any visitation if they saw that? He’d just take it and keep it safe for her—and then had to listen to all of his living siblings give him shit for being too high to track down dead old Dad.

He didn’t see why. Far as he was concerned, he was doing them all a favor. Nobody actually wanted to talk to Dad. Not even Luther. Still, he gave it his best shot, and if he ended up spilling a bit of Dad’s ashes, and dancing around with the urn, and generally being as disrespectful of the dead as a person can be, well then it was just proof that Dad wasn’t hanging around to chat. There was no way he’d have gotten away with that behavior if Dad were anywhere in the vicinity.

#

And then little Five appeared. Five, the long-lost, stubborn little brainiac brother, not a hair changed from the last time Klaus had seen him over a decade ago.

Klaus had always assumed, somewhere in the back of his mind, that Five wasn’t really dead. Because if he was dead, Klaus would be enjoying his ghostly presence in addition to Ben. Unlike Dad, Ben had popped up at Klaus’s side the moment he died. Which had been a little unfortunate really, because Klaus hadn’t been on that mission and so Pogo and Vanya and Mom had learned of Ben’s death, not from a somber Dad but from a sobbing, hysterical Klaus trying to comfort the sobbing, hysterical ghost of his little brother.

So at that moment that Klaus saw little Five, it was a punch to the gut. Because if he was just manifesting now, Five must have _just_ died.

But then it turned out that everyone else could see him, so hurray for that. And if Five had gone completely cuckoo in the time since they’d last seen him, well then it was just proof that he was still part of the family.

Klaus felt weirdly protective of the kid, and he wasn’t upset to get a chance to spend a little more time with him. Back when they were younger, the two of them had gotten along pretty well. Klaus might be more of a noncombatant than the others—and damn if that hadn’t pissed Dad off to no end. No matter how hard he tried, now matter what scenarios he ran or which mausoleum he locked Klaus in, he simply couldn’t figure out how to weaponize him—but he’d trained pretty closely with Five at times. While Luther and Diego were off sparring each other and Allison was getting her legal language lessons, Five and Klaus would often sit in a corner of the house together, trying to wrangle their nebulous abilities. Ben usually hung out with them too, but that was mostly because he wasn’t allowed to train his abilities by himself. Too dangerous, Dad said.

“Did you ever start using a different name?” Klaus asked, sitting in the van beside his stunted little man-child of a brother.

“Hmm?” Five said. He’d been quiet for a little bit, and very still, both of which were out of character for any version of Five Klaus had met.

“You know. Like, pretty soon before you left, Dad told Mom to help us come up with names. You know. I’m Klaus.” He waved his hand a bit. “Not really Four anymore. I don't really remember you picking one. Did you?”

Five nodded as if that answered some question he’d been asking himself, but otherwise didn’t answer Klaus’s question. He stared blankly ahead for a bit, then said, “You know, it’s weird being in this body." He touched his thumbs to the tip of each finger, as if counting them. “Not just because it’s my kid self, of course. You know, I cut off the tip of this ring finger a while back. Crushed it—scavenging, early on. Wall collapse—but that doesn’t really matter. It’s back now. But it feels like it shouldn’t be. I’m more used to not having the finger than having it.”

Klaus nodded along, distantly aware that the conversation was actually interesting, but now distracted by the much more pressing matter of the little girl with a hole in her head standing outside the van and watching Five with thunderous eyes.

“And my vision’s back to not being shit,” Five said, apparently on a roll about the unexpected upsides of his new-old body. “And I have all of my teeth again. You’d be amazed how much you miss your molars.”

Klaus avoided looking at her. When ghosts were focused like that on someone else, they often didn’t notice Klaus unless he paid them attention. He nodded distractedly.

“And if I’d known that I’d be getting my teenage knees back, I’d probably have made the jump a little sooner—” He trailed off. “What?” He sat up to scrutinize Klaus’s face, then puffed out his cheeks and sat back again. “Who do you see?”

“Little girl. Blonde hair. Blue dress,” Klaus said, still pointedly not looking at it.

“Huh,” Five said. “I used to wonder—back before I thought I’d actually make it back to you guys—what you’d see if you ever looked at me. I’ve killed a lot of people.”

“Yeah, you mentioned that,” Klaus said, and scrambled to get them away from the topic. Talking about the ghosts was almost as bad as paying them direct attention. “And if today pans out, I can get high as a kite and go back to not seeing shit around you so, go team, or whatever.” She was turning her head to look at Klaus now, and it felt like there was a fist in his chest. “But you didn’t answer my question. You can’t have jumped through time telling everyone to call you Number Five.”

Five blinked at him. “Why not?”

Klaus considered that, and decided none of his answers were actually good ones. “Do you want me to just keep calling you Five, then?”

Five looked actually stumped by the question. He frowned at Klaus, blinked a couple of times, and then, without looking at his watch or the building or anything else that might have prompted the sudden urgency, said, “Time to go.”

#

Afterward, when Klaus had stopped the bleeding and was picking little bits of snow globe out of his hair, Five hunkered down beside him on the steps with an old man groan. Klaus had to hand it to him, if Five was crazy and making up the whole Time Traveler Brain In Young Body thing up, he was a better actor than Klaus could ever hope to be.

Five heaved a long, slow sigh, then looked at Klaus. His expression was almost paternal, and he reached for Klaus’s hair to pick out a piece of glass. “I appreciate your dedication, but unless you manage to get as temporally-fucked as me, that’s the only body you’ve got. You might want to take care of it.”

Klaus grunted and pushed Five’s hand away. “Diego'll have a great time swapping anti-aging tips with you, but I am not the right audience.”

“Noted.” Five said. The little girl was gone at least, but there were some other people on the sidewalks and benches that didn’t really seem to be part of the crowd of office workers streaming toward their lunch breaks.

Klaus kept his head down, eyes somewhere in the vicinity of both of their feet. “I did my part. So. Your turn.”

Five sighed again. “You know, I met some other Special people in my work. Not many, but a few. One of them was a dead-speaker.”

“Good for them,” Klaus said. “You realize I’m asking you to pay me, right?”

“Yep,” Five said. “Anyway, I chatted with her about you, and she said that she’d never met a dead-speaker who could see the spirits. She only heard them. Isn’t that interesting?”

“Sure,” Klaus said, giving up on the money for the moment and dropping his aching forehead to his knees. “So?”

“So you’re different. She also said drugs didn’t affect her powers.”

“Sucks for her,” Klaus said into his pants.

“You see what I’m getting at?”

Klaus levered himself up an inch with his chin and turned his head to squint at Five. “You’re punishing me for hitting you. I told you I was going to be in character. You had fair warning.”

Five looked up and worked his jaw as if silently saying _Lord give me strength_ , then said, “I’m saying your power’s different. I’m saying it might not just be talking to the dead. Dad certainly thought it was more than that.”

“Oh yeah, I know what he thought,” Klaus said, his voice sharper than he wanted it to be. He could hear the ghosts whispering. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw them looking at him, and soon they’d come closer. He really needed something to take the edge off. “You think I don’t? After all the shit he put me through?”

Five’s eyebrows scrunched together. “I’m just saying—”

“I don't want to hear it.”

"Klaus--"

"Don't."

Five closed his mouth. He looked at Klaus, searching for something in his face, then softened his expression and said, “Okay. Sorry. Wrong time to bring it up.” He stood and straightened his jacket. “But think about it. We need any advantage we can get. We can talk about it later.” He moved as if to leave, but slowed when Klaus reached up to grab at his pant leg.

“Hey, hey, wait, wait." Klaus knew he was whining. “Kid. Pay me.”

Abruptly, Five grinned at him. “I’m just a kid," he said. "Why the hell would _I_ have money?” And then the little shit popped away into a taxi and left Klaus behind to flip him off as his ghostly entourage of victims slowly--sullen eyes still riveted to Klaus--faded away to follow him.

#

Klaus woke blind, with a raging headache, and vaguely damp.

He groaned and assumed, for the moment, that he’d passed out in a puddle somewhere. Or maybe he'd pissed himself. It had happened before. He’d once woken up in an actual closet—it had belonged to a guy he’d been sleeping with, and they’d both had a good laugh about it—after Klaus had explained that he was fine, yes really, and no, the screaming’s normal, just drop it.

He tried screaming now, too, but had the terrifying sensation of his lips refusing to part, and then noticed that his wrists were also stuck together. He kicked, and his legs were taped too. His bare feet hit carpeted wall. The places where his wrists and ankles were bound hurt, the tape tight against bare skin.

It was quiet. All he could hear was his heart and his quick breaths whistling through his nose. He felt around with his feet and fingertips. Towel material wrapped around him, damp. The smell of soap. Carpet underneath him, carpet on all sides, metal above. _Coffin_ , his panicking brain supplied unhelpfully, but he pushed that away. If this were a coffin, he’d be able to stretch his legs out. He thought about it.

“Car trunk,” Ben supplied. His voice came from Klaus’s left, and though Klaus couldn’t see, he knew Ben must be lying down next to him.

“Thank god,” Klaus said, and assumed Ben would understand him through the tape. After all, over the years he’d understood Klaus in way worse conditions.

“You okay?” Ben asked. “They hit your head pretty hard.”

Klaus hummed an affirmative. He wanted to peel the tape off, but it was difficult to move his bound arms in the confined space. In fact, it was difficult to move much at all. He felt drugged, and not in a good way. Tranquilized. Like the one time he'd tried Ketamine--and then never again, because the one thing worse than being tormented by ghosts was being paralyzed and tormented by ghosts.

He resisted the instinct to waste his energy on trying to turn toward Ben’s voice. There wasn’t going to be any help there. Not with getting the tape off, not with having a hand to squeeze so that he didn’t actually pass out from panic.

Instead, he felt slowly around the paneling above him, hoping for a latch but only touching smooth metal. He groaned and let his painfully heavy arms drop. God, he'd never liked sedatives.

“Bath?” Klaus asked, but it came out as a vague "Mmph" beneath the tape.

Still, Ben understood him. “Yeah, dude. Two people in these big inflatable masks. I tried to warn you.”

“How?”

“I think they just walked into the house.”

Klaus thought about that for a minute. It was crazy to imagine they’d have just walked in, grabbed Klaus, and dragged him out. “The others?”

“I saw some fighting. Heard more. The big one grabbed you while the smaller one was still duking it out with Diego and Allison. Didn’t see how it ended. I think they wanted Five, but he wasn’t there.”

“Huh,” Klaus huffed, then chuckled. “I’m fucked.” Because his siblings wouldn’t think to look for him on a good day. Knowing his luck, they’d probably only remember him when the police came to identify the body.

“Yeah,” Ben said.

Outside, muffled voices grew closer, and Klaus gathered his energy to scream in case they were passerby who might notice a screaming trunk and call the police, but the voices stopped right outside, and metal thunked against metal before a key slid audibly into the lock. It opened, and Klaus knew it wouldn’t do any good, but he went ahead and screamed anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!  
> I really enjoyed this show and haven't been able to get it off the brain. This plot is me trying my best to show it the door so that I can maybe move on with my life, haha.  
> Probably just one or two more parts. Rating might go up.  
> 


	2. Chapter 2

Klaus had probably seen too many gangster movies; he was expecting the car to be parked in a gloomy dockside warehouse, or beside a freshly-dug grave in a dark forest. He wasn’t expecting white streetlamp light to stream into the trunk, or to hear the rushing sound of a busy street nearby. Past the wide shoulders and the massive round edges of the masks, he caught a corner glimpse of a flickering blue motel sign.

Klaus tried to sit up, but the person in the pink mask grabbed his face with a gloved hand and shoved him back down into the trunk.

“He’s awake,” the pink one said. The voice was a woman’s voice, and she sounded angry. “Did you give him enough?”

“‘Course I did,” the blue one said. This one sounded like a man, and while the tone wasn’t as angry, it was pitched with annoyance.

The pink one produced a flashlight, and then adjusted her grip on Klaus’s face so that she could pry open one of his eyelids. She shined the light into it, tilting his head this way and that, like a veterinarian with an uncooperative dog.

“Mmph,” Klaus protested behind the tape*, blinded, eyes stinging. He tried to pull back but the fingers were hooked, vice-like, behind the hinge of his jaw.

“Looks alright, I guess,” the pink one said, and let him go.

“Told you,” the blue on said as he reached out to grab Klaus’s arm. Klaus tried to push the hand away, and then yelped when the other arm scooped underneath his legs and threw him heavily over a broad shoulder.

“Okay, okay,” the pink one said. “You did good.”

“I know how to take a damn hostage,” the blue one said, placated now but still grumbling.

Five black spots, in the shape of the little bulbs in the flashlight’s face, took massive chunks out of Klaus’s vision. He blinked hard and saw pavement, an upside down empty parking lot, and then a big expanse of coat jacket as his face bounced against the guy’s back. Big boy was walking somewhere with him. He could hear the distant _thunk_ of the other one shutting the trunk.

Klaus hung limply for a moment, catching his breath, and then arched his back and twisted, grunting in frustration when his muscles still refused to respond the way they should. Still, thin and drugged, Klaus was a grown-ass six-foot-tall human, and he took his manhandler by surprise. The guy stumbled and nearly dropped him.

“Whoa, none of that,” the guy said, and hefted Klaus higher in his grip, his shoulder digging painfully, breath-squeezingly, into Klaus’s stomach. Klaus kicked a bit more, but then had to stop and focus on taking in air. He could feel his towel unraveling from where it was tucked beneath his armpit.

“You lose that, you’re not getting it back,” the pink one said.

Klaus was gasping through his nose against the painful hold but still mustered the energy to kick and wriggle some more. If they thought the threat of lost dignity would ever be enough to deter him from something, then they definitely had no idea who it was that they’d kidnapped. The towel hung on, just barely, through the journey across the parking lot and up the stairs.

They stopped at a door at the top of the stairwell and paused while the pink one dug through an inner pocket.

“Ooh, I don’t think we want to go in there,” Ben said mildly. His voice was close to Klaus’s head, though Klaus couldn’t turn enough to see him. Klaus agreed with Ben’s assessment and mustered his last bit of energy to kick his feet against the closed door as hard as he could. The guy carrying him stumbled backward a step, and Klaus hoped honestly that they might just both tumble down the stairs, because being crushed beneath the man’s big body was several solid steps up from being dismembered and sacrificed to a pagan god or whatever it was that awaited him on the other side of that motel room door.

But, the big guy had good balance and straightened while Pink keyed open the door. He moved to hurry inside, and Klaus stretched out his feet in one last attempt and managed to hook the top of a foot, painfully, on the edge of the doorframe.

“Give it up, kid,” Blue said. He grabbed Klaus’s foot, unhooked it from the doorway and dug a gloved finger hard into the soft spot where heel meets arch. He must have hit a nerve or something, because it felt like he’d taken a hammer and driven a nail into the bone, and Klaus screwed his eyes shut and screamed through his nose. Blue staggered inside. The valiant towel finally gave up the fight and slid to the ground.

“Oh for the love of—” Pink said, shoving Blue several steps further into the room and then disappearing from Klaus’s vision. He was pretty sure he heard her going back to pick the towel up from the walkway outside the door.

Blue lifted Klaus off of his shoulder and set him down roughly on his feet. Klaus’s knees gave out. Blue caught him and hooked his hands under Klaus’s arms to hold him up. Klaus hissed at the pressure on his heel. It still felt like there was a nail lodged right there in the bone, though the pain was already fading.

“Shut up. That didn’t hurt that bad,” Blue said, and Klaus had to disagree, because it had been both extremely uncalled for and way more painful than it had any right to be. He hoped his expression got the point across, but he doubted it. Something about the way Blue’s mask was tilted gave Klaus the impression that the face underneath was averting its eyes.

Pink reappeared and wrapped the towel back around Klaus, at his waist.

“I. Do not have. The patience. For this,” she growled, pulling out a roll of duct tape and actually layering a long strip over the knot in the towel to keep it closed. “Put him down.”

Blue lowered Klaus into the wooden chair in the center of the room. Pink pulled out a knife, cut through the tape at Klaus’s ankles, and began to tape his shins to the chair legs with quick, efficient motions. Klaus considered kicking at her, but didn’t dare with that knife in her hands.

Further into the room, Klaus caught glimpses of Ben walking around. There were two beds, a small table, only his chair and one other. Another door at the other side of the room likely led to a bathroom.

Ben was snooping, ducking down to see what he could of their open suitcases, looking over the crumpled bags and receipts on the bedside table. “They’ve been eating a lot of donuts,” he said. “Doesn’t look like they own much, though.”

“I just want to warn you,” Blue said, and then snapped his fingers to get Klaus to look at him. “My partner and I weren’t in the greatest moods before you showed up, and you’ve just put yourself very efficiently at the top of our shit list.”

Klaus nodded. He was good at that.

Pink finished taping his legs down and then sat back on her heels. She rested her elbows on his knees. She’d left Klaus’s hands taped together in front of him, and her mask was big enough that Klaus had to pull his arms against his chest to avoid touching it. “So,” she said, taking up where Blue left off. “We just want you to know what’s about to happen. I’m about to take this tape off your mouth.” She held up one finger. “You can scream, which I promise isn’t going to go great for you. Or,” she held up her second finger, “We can keep this low-volume and have a nice chat. Which road you wanna take?”

Klaus hesitated, then held up two of his own fingers.

She patted his shoulder, then pulled the tape from his mouth with a quick, practiced yank.

“Ow,” Klaus said, and brought his fingers up to touch his mouth. His hands still smelled like lavender bubble bath and the cigarette he’d been smoking. His lips and chin were sticky from the adhesive.

“You’re Special,” Blue commented, and that must have been off-script because Pink’s head jerked to look at him. “Like those guys back at that house.” Pink’s look made him defensive, and he explained, “He should still be drooling on the floor. Burned through that sedative almost an hour before he should’ve.”

“Hmm,” Klaus hummed, mostly because Blue seemed to expect a response to that. If he wanted to think Klaus’s power involved ultra-high metabolism or something—which, thank god it didn’t or he’d be spending a disgusting amount of his time sober—he could go right ahead.

Instead, Klaus swallowed and parted his stinging lips to say, “What am I doing here?” His voice was a croak and his mouth tasted like day-old coffee. He thought he saw Pink edging ever so slightly away from him—his breath must be rank, even through the mask.

“Why do you think you’re here?” Pink asked.

“I—” Klaus looked at Ben, who was now leaning against the dresser. Ben shrugged. “—stole something from you?” Klaus guessed. “Or Diego killed someone important?” He was sure Luther didn’t do anything up on the moon. Maybe Allison? “He doesn’t care what happens to me, I promise. You can save yourself the trouble.”

The masks were silent for a moment, and then Blue said, “Diego?”

Klaus pressed his lips together. “Not Diego?”

“We’re here about Number Five,” Pink said. “We want info.”

“Oh.” Klaus felt a sudden wave of exhaustion push down on him. Of course. Little Five. He looked at Ben.

“What do they want to know?” Ben asked. Klaus repeated the question.

“Well, let’s start with where he is,” Pink said. “We need to track him down ASAP.”

“Oh, believe me, me too,” Klaus said, vaguely aware that Ben was shushing him but the words were already on their way out of his mouth. “That shit owes me money.”

The masks somehow managed to trade glances with each other. “Alright,” Pink said. “Then how do you know him?”

“We, uh,” Klaus said. Ben looked as uncertain as he felt, so Klaus tried out the truth. “We’re brothers.”

“Brothers,” Pink repeated, while at the same time Blue said, “Bullshit.” They looked at each other again.

“Yeah,” Pink agreed. “My partner and I—we got a knack for family resemblance, especially a generation or two apart. Nature of the job. You two aren’t related.” Pink’s mask was still far too close for Klaus’s liking. The rough material of her suit trousers kept brushing against Klaus’s bare legs.

“What _is_ your job?” Ben asked, and Klaus repeated.

“Right now, all you need to know is he’s a lie detector and I hit things,” Pink said. “Now tell the truth. How do you know Number Five?”

“Don’t answer that,” Ben said, but Klaus’s raw nerves were already pretty done with this conversation, and so he doubled down and said, “Brothers. Like I said. Adopted.”

“Oh, he’s your _adopted_ brother,” Pink repeated, as if she were playing along with a little kid’s imaginary story. She pulled out of his space and stood, and Klaus lowered his arms and let himself breathe a little more deeply. Then, the back of her gloved hand hit Klaus’s face hard enough to knock his head to the side. She had her knife out again, and Blue’s hands appeared out of nowhere to clamp down on Klaus’s upper arms, and then she was slicing apart the tape around his hands and grabbing his left wrist and wrapping fresh tape deftly around it and the armrest of the chair.

Klaus, ears pounding with fresh panic, but also angry now—he’d always gotten so angry when someone slapped him, he couldn’t help it—struggled more than he should have, twisting his arms and nearly catching his own wrist against Pink’s blade. When one of Blue’s big meaty hands lifted to adjust for a better grip, Klaus arched and bit him as hard as he could, teeth clamping down at the wrist where the cotton sleeve cuff gave way to skin. That earned him an actual punch to the side of the head, and he spent the next long minute with his head down, feeling very distant as he watched Pink’s gloved leather hands finish taping his arms to the chair.

Klaus gingerly worked his throbbing jaw to see if it was broken. It hurt, but moved alright. It had been a while since he’d trained with his siblings; he’d almost forgotten how much it hurt to catch a real, full-strength punch. He could taste blood where the inside of his cheek had split against his molars.

Finally, Pink stood back to survey her handiwork. She tested the tape, and squeezed his hands, apparently checking the color to make sure he wasn’t losing circulation. She reached up to grab his face as well, turned it one way, then the other, touching his cheek and temple to check for breaks. Once she was satisfied that he wasn’t too damaged, she slapped him again, hard, and moved to go check on her partner.

Blue was bleeding. Maybe that was some of the blood Klaus was tasting. He spat a couple of times to get it out of his mouth. The armrests were a little low. With his arms flush against them, he couldn’t sit up completely straight.

“You’re an idiot,” Ben said.

“I know,” Klaus whispered. “Are you gonna leave? Please don’t leave.”

“I’m not gonna leave.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m gonna go see what they’re saying,” Ben said. The masks had retreated to the bathroom and were speaking in low, heated voices. Ben moved toward them, his fingertips stretching briefly over Klaus’s taped wrist as he walked by.

Klaus’s heart was pounding in his chest again, and even with his mouth uncovered it felt like he couldn’t get enough air. He never had the right responses in violent situations. Luther could take a hit and dish right back. Diego and Allison at least kept their composure. Klaus was great at talking shit and dodging and fighting dirty, but the moment there was a space in the action, he got all weak and uncoordinated. Dad had always been terribly disappointed about it. Called it a panic response and tried his best to train Klaus out of it, with little success.

It hadn’t exactly been a focus, but Dad actually had given them some counter-interrogation training. Mostly theory, though. Of course, he’d mostly seemed concerned that someone might kidnap one of the kids to try and control Dad or learn his secrets, the narcissistic bastard.

 _If they want something you have, let them think you can give it to them, but that you’re refusing to. If they want something you know, even if you don’t know it, refuse to tell them._ Here, he’d reached up to adjust his monocle. _Life isn’t like the movies. If they get what they want from you, they’re not going to let you go. They’re going to kill you. And if they think you’re useless, then they’ll just kill you sooner._

 _And Number Four,_ he’d said, turning a sour eye on Klaus _, for the love of god, if there’s ever a time in your life when you can learn to think before you speak—._

That advice rolled around in Klaus’s head as Ben reappeared. He made his way over to Klaus with measured steps. He lowered himself until he was at eye level, his expression very calm in the way that Klaus knew meant that he was trying his best not to let Klaus know what he was thinking.

Klaus swallowed. “What, are they gonna kill me?” Because if so, he was just going to start screaming his head off and then at least once he was dead they’d have a good chance of dying in a shootout with the cops or something.

“No,” Ben said. “I think they’re going to torture you, though.”

“Oh.” Klaus licked his lips, then nodded a little. “Yeah, alright. That was pretty inevitable I guess. I don’t know—” _what to do_ , he almost said, but then swallowed the lump in his throat and said, “You don’t actually have to stick around for that.”

In response, Ben settled even more firmly against the dresser in front of Klaus’s chair.

The masks reappeared from the bathroom. Blue’s shirt sleeve was pulled down low over his wrist, hiding whatever damage Klaus had inflicted. Pink had her knife out.

“Know any good jokes?” Klaus said.

Ben’s arms were crossed. His fingers were tight and pale where they gripped the material of his jacket. “You hear the one about the guy who liked to run in front of cars?”

Klaus shook his head. There were right next to him now. Blue was wrapping a towel around his arm

“He got tired,” Ben said, at the same moment that Pink said, “You got any real info, now would be the time.”

Klaus laughed. “God, I wish I did,” he said, and then they stepped forward and he’d had a vague notion of channeling some Diego or somebody equally stoic, but when Pink crouched in front of him again, he decided that was an unreasonable expectation for himself and went ahead and let himself beg. “Please,” he said. “Please, don’t. Please.” He looked at Blue. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I bit you. I really don’t know shit. Don’t—” Blue knelt down behind Klaus and pinned him against the chair with a heavy arm, and then clapped a towel-wrapped hand over his nose and mouth. Another hand gripped Klaus’s own, and something sharp touched his fingertip, started to force slowly beneath the nail, and then he was screaming, screaming, the pain pushing out all other thought.

#

“Where’s Klaus?” Five asked, marching through the halls of the mansion like a miniature assassin, hair mussed, dried blood on his shoes.

“Klaus?” Diego said. He thought about it. “I dunno. Why?”

“Nothing,” Five said. “I just could use some—” He thought about it. “—Adult supervision.”

Diego rolled his eyes. Of course Klaus hadn’t kept whatever vague appointment that Five had set. He was Klaus.

As he watched Five stalk away, Diego wondered faintly if he should do something about the apparent havoc that Five was wreaking, but honestly he was just glad to see that the kid was fine. After the attack on the mansion, they’d all been worried about little Five. It seemed like the attackers might have been connected with him.

Diego went to go find a phone. He needed to let Eudora know that his brother wasn’t missing after all.

#

Klaus watched blearily as Pink once again held the knife blade over the lighter.

He knew he should be afraid, and he was, terribly, but mostly he was just so very tired. They’d been at him for a few hours now, without break. He was already missing way too many finger- and toenails, and the symphony of bruises and cuts and burns made up a kind of hellish soundtrack to his thoughts, and now, on top of all of that, he could feel himself slip-and-sliding into the mud pits of withdrawal. He was sweating so much that he felt like he’d just stepped out of a shower.

“I think I’m gonna puke,” he muttered, and then laughed shakily when Pink shuffled quickly out of range. He did puke, just bile, into a trash can that was shoved impressively quickly into his lap. He paid for it of course, and the laughter.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he said between gritted teeth, once the sizzling blade was removed from the skin of his upper arm and Blue had lifted his towel-wrapped muffling gag—now quite damp and bloodied—away from Klaus’s mouth.

“It’s alright,” Klaus said to Ben, who he could see just on the edge of his vision, pacing back and forth in the space between the door and Klaus’s chair.

“Don’t worry about me,” Ben said. “And shut up. I’m thinking.”

“How could I ever worry about you?” Klaus said in a lilting voice. He’d long stopped trying to hide his side of his conversations with Ben. Sometimes the masks told him to shut up, but mostly they treated it like meaningless chatter. They seemed to have assumed that he was at least a little bit insane, or that he was fucking with them, or both.

“Who aren’t you worried about?” Pink asked, angry at the moment and refusing to ignore it.

Klaus just jerked his head to point his chin in Ben’s direction. Both masks looked at the empty section of floor, then turned back to Klaus.

Pink touched the top of her mask as if she were reflexively trying to run a hand through her hair. “Are you actually stupid or something?”

“It _has_ been suggested,” Klaus said, watching as they held the knife over the flame again. He felt a sob working its way up his throat, and he was too exhausted to decide what he wanted to do with it, so he just let it out. It hurt his raw throat and his pounding head, and it was amazing to him that he still had enough water in his body to produce any new tears, but crying still helped a little bit. 

Pink brought the hot blade close to his skin again, and he twisted uselessly and swore, and started screaming almost before Blue could cover his mouth again. He could hear his skin burning beneath the metal, and now that the nausea stage of withdrawal was kicking into full swing, he vomited again, this time all over Blue’s hand.

“Ugh,” Blue said, unwrapping the towel from around his hand with apparent disgust while Pink gripped Klaus’s hair and shook him like a disobedient puppy. “This is getting old.”

“Yeah,” Klaus agreed with a heavy sigh. It took all of his willpower not to puke again.

Pink heated the knife again. Blue went to fetch another towel.

“You know this can end any time,” Pink said, as soon as Blue came back. She brought the faintly glowing blade close to a stretch of skin above Klaus’s navel. He could feel the heat from it stinging the burns that were already there. “Just say the word.”

Klaus looked up at the ceiling, eyes blurring, and then jerked his head back down when he caught sight of a short, quick motion from near the door. His eyes focused just in time to see Ben, teeth gritted in vicious concentration as he put one heavy hand on Klaus's shoulder and reached across to slap the knife right out of Pink’s hand. The blade flew sideways and landed in the thick carpet with a soft  _thump._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again for reading! I appreciate any and all feedback.
> 
>  
> 
> *Let's just assume that this is super-special-future-duct-tape that can actually stick to damp skin somehow.


	3. Chapter 3

Pink was frozen, her empty hand still outstretched. The hot knife burned a little black patch into the carpet and gave off an acrid little tendril of smoke. Klaus stared at it and assumed that he’d finally started hallucinating. That was fine. Reality was terrible anyway.

“What—” Pink began, right as Ben’s fist made contact with her face—or her mask, and _then_ her face. Her head snapped back. She staggered and sat heavily on one of the beds.

“—The fuck,” Blue finished for her.

Klaus looked up at Ben, who was practically crouched over him like a momma bear, eyes narrow, his teeth actually bared a little bit. For a long, impossible moment, Klaus could still feel the warm weight of Ben’s protective grip on his shoulder.

Then, Klaus took another breath, the weight disappeared, and Ben tumbled straight through him and onto the floor.

“Shit,” Ben muttered. He pushed himself back up, moving right through Klaus as he did so. He tried automatically to steady himself on Klaus’s knee, and fell through and to the ground again. “Shit,” he repeated.

“ _Shit_ ,” Pink said while Ben was still losing his battle with the floor. Klaus finally looked at her again just as she turned away from him and whipped off her mask. He didn’t see her face, but he did see her hand when she tilted it at Blue. Blood was welling from a deep gash in the center of her palm. The blade must have cut her when Ben knocked it away.

Blue loosened his grip on Klaus and moved to help her, but Pink shook her head, sputtered, and pointed at Klaus with a bloody finger and said, “Deal with it.”

Klaus swallowed, then said quickly, “Wait. What did you see?" He had to know if he'd actually completely lost it. "Just now, what did you—”

“Shut up.” Blue clapped his massive hand over Klaus’s face, covering his eyes and nose and most of his mouth. Klaus tried to bite him again, but the grip just tightened and he had a moment of hilarious certainty that the guy was just going to smother him right then and there, strangle him with his big sweaty palm. He dragged Klaus backward in his chair, rustled one-handed on the bed for a moment, and then lifted his hand and dropped the thick fabric of a motel pillowcase over Klaus’s head.

Instantly, Blue’s heavy breathing and Pink’s distant swearing in the bathroom got just a little bit muffled. Distant.

Blue let him go and stepped away. Klaus heard the bathroom door close, and then he was alone with his own breathing. He blinked a couple of times. The pillowcase let in a little bit of light but was pretty effective as far as blindfolds go.

“You still here?” Klaus said. God, his breath stank. He snapped his mouth shut and tried to breathe through his nose.

“I’m here,” Ben said. He sounded distant, like he did when Klaus was too high and he was about to wander away for a while.

“Don’t leave,” Klaus said, quickly.

“I’m here,” Ben said, stronger now, seemingly making an effort to stay present. His voice was right by Klaus’s head again, but his palm didn’t reappear on his shoulder.

“Did you really just do that?” Klaus asked.

“Yeah.”

"Are you sure?"

Ben laughed a little. "Yeah."

“How did you—? Can you still—?” Klaus's voice caught inexplicably in his throat.

“I don’t know how to do it again,” Ben said. He sounded frustrated.

“Oh,” Klaus said. He swallowed and tried to say something else, but instead just started to cry. Not the shallow, weak crying that he’d been doing on and off for most of the night—these were deep, childlike, dead-dog, widow-at-a-funeral kinds of sobs.

“Klaus?” Ben said, sounding as surprised as Klaus felt. When Klaus just shook his head inside the stupid pillowcase and didn’t answer, Ben’s voice moved until it was right in front of Klaus’s face. “Hey. It’s o—well, it’s not okay. But you have to keep it together. You can have a good, solid meltdown once all of this is over.”

Klaus shook his head again, feeling ridiculous, words catching as he tried and failed to articulate why that brief moment of warm, solid grip on his shoulder had left something so sharp and dark and painful in his chest.

“Klaus.” Ben sounded impatient now, which usually meant he was trying not to join Klaus in the tears.

“I’m fine. I’m fine,” Klaus finally managed to say, voice cracking. “It’s just. You were here, and—God, it’s so fucking stupid,” he said as he finally put a name to the horrible weight in his chest. It was grief. Newly exposed and raw, like when dreaming that a loved one was still alive, and then waking up to find them lost all over again. It had been a long time since Klaus had felt that.

“You were here,” he tried to explain, “and you were _real_. And now you’re gone again.” He bit his lip and laughed ruefully and just barely managed not to dissolve again.

“Oh.” Ben was quiet for a few breaths. When he spoke again, his voice was a little distant, which meant that he was putting a lid on emotions that he didn't want to deal with right now. He’d always been way better at that than Klaus. “I know. Feels a little like that for me too. Usually it kinda feels like the whole world’s dead and I’m the only real thing. Being that solid for a second—I don't know.”

Klaus swallowed and nodded, and took a few deep breaths so that he wouldn’t start crying about _Ben’s_ shit on top of everything else. He already was somewhat aware of what Ben meant. Ben had told him plenty of times just how fucking sad it was to be dead, and they both agreed that that grief was probably a large part of what drove angry spirits into such rages. He and Ben could probably co-write a half-decent book on ghost psychology, if either of them could muster the attention span for it.

“Though I gotta say,” Ben added. “Hitting that woman is the most satisfying thing I’ve done in a long time.”

Klaus laughed, finally gaining a little bit of momentum against the tears. “That is some consolation, I suppose.” He scrambled to pull himself together, because he was tired and in pain and withdrawing like a son of a bitch. Anyone would agree that qualifies as deserving a good breakdown, but he just didn’t have the time for one of those right then. “Sorry. Fuck. You were here. Hitting people and everything to save little old me. Thank you.”

“I was,” Ben said. Klaus could hear a little bit of a grin now. “Don’t thank me yet, though. That lady’s gonna take that out on you. She looked pissed.”

Klaus shrugged. “Like that wasn’t gonna happen anyway. At least now, when they kill me—”

“They’re not going to kill you,” Ben interjected.

“ _If_ they kill me,” Klaus corrected himself and rolled his eyes because he knew Ben would take issue with that version too. “And I don’t know. I—” He paused. “—Don’t remember what I was saying.” God, if normal withdrawals made him scattered, this night was going to get really ridiculous really quickly. He changed directions. “How did you do that? You’ve never done that before.” He frowned. “Have you?”

“I haven’t,” Ben said. “And I don’t know how I did it, but—” He paused, as if listening. “Give me a sec. Gonna go eavesdrop a little,” he said, words rushed, and then disappeared.

“Okay,” Klaus said, and sat for a moment in the muffled quiet. He realized, belatedly, that this was the first time in hours that he’d had a chance to just sit in peace. He tried his best to enjoy it. Or, enjoying it was probably out of the question, but savor it maybe. Try for a little Zen. 

After about thirty seconds of trying, he gave up and decided to shoot for at least a little less active suffering. His face felt disgusting. He was getting nauseous again. He had a brief, vaguely horrifying image of throwing up in with the pillowcase over his head.

“Nope. Not gonna happen,” he grunted as he dropped his chin down and shook his head slowly, trying to dislodge the pillowcase without making himself dizzy. It didn’t budge. The angle was awkward, and the heavy opening of the material had bunched around his neck and shoulders. He leaned farther down and managed to snag a corner of the pillowcase between his aching fingertips and, gritting his teeth against the sting of his raw nail beds, tugged the case off of his head.

“Ugh, thank God.” He sighed and let his head tip back in the welcome rush of fresh air. He was all congested now, and in addition to the taste of blood in his mouth, he had the fabulous addition of snot and tears and probably Blue’s disgusting palm sweat on top of that. He shrugged up one arm and did his best to wipe his face off on his shoulder, leaving behind black smears of eyeliner on his skin. He must look like a raccoon.

“Keep it together,” he told himself. His head was ringing like a cathedral bell. He decided that if he actually did, by some miracle, get out of that room, he was going to get so high that he wouldn’t come down for a week. A month _._ He imagined it for a moment, picturing it as something like a man lying in a water fountain after days in the desert, but instead of water it would be heroin. A big bag of it, and a comfy bed, and a cigarette, and some shitty TV tuned to the fashion channel.

Ben phased back through the closed bathroom door and returned to Klaus’s side.

“You okay?” he asked, scrutinizing Klaus’s face.

“Walking on sunshine,” Klaus said, and then, “Stop worrying. I’m fine. What are they saying?”

“Well, first off, they’re calling you telekinetic, and I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure that means they think you punched her with your brain,” Ben said. “That’s why they put that bag on your head. Apparently, telekinetics need line of sight.” Ben glanced back in the direction of the closed door, then back at Klaus. “Didn’t know telekinesis was common enough to have a planned strategy against it, but these two certainly have a protocol.”

“Huh.” Klaus frowned. “If I can brain-punch people, shouldn't I have done that hours ago?”

“Their current theory is that you’re crap at it.”

“Oh, yeah, that makes sense.” Klaus hadn’t exactly given them a first impression that screamed competence. “So what actually happened?”

“I have no idea,” Ben said, then frowned and said, “I’m not sure.”

“Well, if you don’t know, then we’re fucked,” Klaus said. “I’m still not one hundred percent sure that this isn’t a hallucination.”

Ben pursed his lips, and then, with sudden animation, dropped to his knees and leaned forward, just like he did when they were kids and he wanted to share a secret. “Okay. So I was thinking about what Five said, and it reminded me a bit of how I feel more— _real_ some times, you know? Specifically, when you start getting soberer--more sober. That’s when I’m the most real. We know that.” He paused for a second, then continued. “And I was thinking about some of the times you’ve been in trouble in the past few years, when you really could have used backup. Like those assholes you owed money to downtown. Or that guy back in Midland.”

Klausthought about it. “Why those times specifically?” He couldn’t even remember much of either of those situations. He was pretty sure he’d held his own okay for the first one. Broken rib, maybe. But all he could remember of the second was just a vague notion of a really bad night. He’d gotten away from the guy, but the bruises on his neck had taken weeks to fade.

“You needed help,” Ben said simply. “Usually you don’t. But you were high enough and scared enough that you actually asked me for help. And I felt like maybe I _could_ help somehow… but you were so drugged. I could barely even stick around.”

He fell silent again, expression grim. Klaus waited him out.

“So I was thinking,” Ben finally continued, “that now, you needed help, and you were asking me for help, and you’re more sober—” He trailed off, then finished, “I don’t know. I felt so real in that moment. I knew, I just _knew_ that if I did something, it would work.”

“Huh,” Klaus said. “Well. I approve of your choice of first person to punch in five years. How real are you feeling now?”

Ben shrugged. “Not very.” Still, he reached out and tried to touch Klaus’s hand. Klaus could swear that he _almost_ felt something. But then Ben’s fingers fell right through, and he sat back with a sigh.

Klaus sighed as well, then laughed. “Well shit. Learned a new trick right when I’m about to kick it. Sorry, man.”

“No, no, we can practice,” Ben insisted. He sat up again and held his hand over Klaus’s again. “Before they come back. Try and focus on me and we can try again.”

The masks were gone a while. Ben and Klaus tried to figure out Ben’s new trick. It was so hard to focus, and Klaus wasn't really sure what he was supposed to focus on anyway.

It did work once: Klaus complained about an itch on his nose, asked for Ben to scratch it, and then yelped when Ben did, in fact, scratch it.

They were both ecstatic, but just as they did a silent little celebration, there was a clatter from the bathroom door. Blue emerged, and Klaus quickly dropped the grin from his face.

Blue, however, didn’t seem to so much as look at Klaus. He stalked past him, out the door, and disappeared for a long, quiet minute. Ben and Klaus were just managing to relax enough to consider continuin their impromptu practice session when there was the beep of a keycard at the door and Blue reappeared. He was holding a phonebook that he appeared to have ripped out of a phone booth. It was still trailing its delicate little chain. He hefted it in one hand, and then scooped the motel phone from its place on the desk, and disappeared back into the bathroom. The phone’s cords stretched, a couple of straight lines straining from the far wall.

Ben went to go eavesdrop, but came back soon with a shrug and said that they were both just sitting there while whatever number it was that they were calling rang and rang and rang.

They returned to their practice. After several long, unsuccessful minutes, the silence in the bathroom was broken by Pink’s raised voice, loud enough to hear but too soft to understand. She was speaking calmly and slowly, as if trying to relay information to someone that she suspected wasn’t giving her their full attention.

Abruptly, the bathroom door flew open and Pink stalked out. She hadn't put her mask back on. Klaus studied her face and realized that, in his mind, these people hadn’t had real faces under those masks, and that it was so much more terrifying to have a real person marching toward him like that. She’d brought the phone with her, cradle and all, and the cords threatened to tangle beneath her feet as she moved. There was dried blood on her lips and chin. It looked like Ben might have actually managed to break her nose.

She grabbed Klaus’s hair, not really hard enough to hurt, tilted his head back, and held the receiver side of the phone up to Klaus’s mouth.

“Um.” Klaus looked at her stupidly, unsure of what he was supposed to say. He decided not to say anything. Wouldn’t Dad be proud.

With an impatient eye roll, she snapped her fingers at Blue, who Klaus hadn’t even noticed until that moment, glued as he’d been to Pink’s even-more-terrifying-than-ever presence. Blue didn’t move, just looked at her in his expressionless mask, and she raised her eyebrows right back at him, as if daring him to question her, and Blue sighed and reached across Klaus and bent the first finger on Klaus’s right hand all the way back until it broke with an audible _snap_.

Klaus screamed. Really screamed—they hadn’t covered his mouth this time—and tried to curl in on himself, pulling against Pink's grip on his hair, and when he finally managed to drag in a few breaths, eyes spotting, Blue broke the next finger, and he screamed again, cracked and breathless. When Blue snapped a third, Klaus knew he was keening and swearing, could feel his mouth forming the words _please_ and _stop_ over, but he couldn't hear anything, as if the pain were a sound so loud that it drowned out everything else.

Pink kept her tight grip in his hair, and he realized distantly that it was to keep him from moving his head away from the receiver. Blue returned to the first finger and bent it forward again slowly, pushing it flat as if trying, inexpertly, to set the broken bone.

After some uncertain amount of time, Pink gestured and Blue stopped. She lifted the receiver from Klaus's face, wiped his sweat and spit off on her sleeve, and then held the speaker to her ear. She hummed, as if unimpressed with what she was hearing. "I don't think so," she said.

“Stop,” Klaus said, or was pretty sure he tried to say when she released his hair and gestured at Blue to start again. “Please. Don’t. Don’t, don’t,” and then he was no longer talking to them when he said, “Please. Make it stop.”

Blue had reached for Klaus's other hand, but his reach stopped with a jolt as Ben’s shoulder hit him squarely in the gut. They both staggered sideways, and Blue crashed into the table. Ben marched after him, briefly tangled with the empty chair, then threw it aside and hurled himself at Blue again. But Blue was huge and Ben had always been a lightweight—without the element of surprise, Blue didn’t go down and instead took a wild, blind swing that managed to pass right through where Ben stood. Ben, who had ducked reflexively, popped back up to return the punch and cackled when his fist connected. 

Pink watched, her lips tight, eyes half-crazed, but didn’t do anything to intervene as Blue stumbled around, swinging at the air and hitting nowhere near where Ben was standing, likely just looking to Pink like he was trying to punch an elusive mosquito. Ben tried to land more hits, but he was passing through Blue again followed after Blue and kept trying and failing to make his hits land. Pink seemed to be listening intently to what the person on the phone was telling her.

Klaus tried to catch his breath, but it was impossible because the pain was crushing him flat and he knew there couldn't possibly be any space left in his body for air.

Pink turned her gaze on him. They stared at each other, Klaus gasping and feeling very much like a rat in a trap, waiting for the inevitable stomp, her with the phone still to her ear. She hummed after a moment, said, "No," and then, “If you want,” and then, “Good."

She set the phone gently back in its cradle. “Hazel," she said, addressing Blue. "Stop being an idiot. There’s nothing there. It’s just him.”

She turned back to Klaus. He flinched, but all she did was reach for the roll of tape, tear off a piece, and slap it over his mouth. She plucked the pillowcase from the floor and pulled it back over his head.

“You’ve got plenty more parts to break,” she said, her voice a block of ice. “Don’t take that off again.”

#

“Diego,” Five asked from the doorway of Diego’s old room in the mansion. “Where are Allison and Luther?”

“I don’t know why you keep expecting me to know where people are,” Diego said, eyes on the blade he was sharpening. Of course, it was already plenty sharp, and nobody really needs throwing knives to reach razor status, but he just liked doing it. Helped him think. “What’s up?”

“I just got a very interesting call from our masked interlopers.”

“Oh yeah?” Diego had heard the phone ringing, but had comfortably ignored it in favor of continuing his brood.“They gonna pay us back for the chandelier?”

“They’ve got Klaus.”

“They what?” Diego looked up, and finally saw the tight, controlled anger in Five’s posture. Diego straightened as well. He set down the knife. “How do you know they aren’t bluffing?”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure it was him,” Five said, and for just a moment, something much darker than anger slipped out from beneath his control, but was quickly shoved back down. He combed a steady hand through his hair and managed to sound practically cavalier as he said, “I was thinking I’d go pick him up. Want to come?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoops, went a little longer than expected! Please forgive the indulgent angst. It's going to take a turn for the better soon, I promise!  
> Wrapping everything up in the next chapter. Thanks for reading and for all of the lovely comments!


	4. Chapter 4

A while back, Klaus had a sort-of-fling with a barista who worked at one of the fancy coffee shops downtown.

“Dated” would be a little too strong of a word for what they were to each other. The guy had been fun in bed, always had great weed on hand, and made a half-decent mocha if you asked him nicely. Once, they were together and he pinned Klaus down and wrapped a hand around his neck—something that Klaus had asked him to do and thoroughly approved of—and they’d been having a fabulous time right up until the guy tried slapping him and Klaus responded with a punch that damn near broke the guy’s jaw.

They’d both been apologetic, and the guy didn’t put an ounce of blame on Klaus for it, not even when he ended up sporting an ugly shiner for a week afterward. Their tentative sort-of-fling didn’t last long after that, though. Not because the guy held it against Klaus, but because he was convinced that there must be some terrible trauma in Klaus’s past for him to have reacted that way, and accordingly treated Klaus like he was made of glass. Klaus had tried to convince him otherwise, but apparently he said “I’m not traumatized” with the same healthy dose of sarcasm that he said things like, “I’m definitely sober,” or “Talking to the dead is great. Honestly. Try it sometime.”

Still, it taught Klaus about a side of himself that he didn’t really get to see all that often. He’d always thought of himself as the pacifist of the group. The noncombatant, practically harmless. But when he was angry—Well. When he was angry, he could be a hell of a lot like his siblings.

#

“Klaus,” Ben said. “Just breathe.” He might have been saying it for a while, but this was the first time Klaus was really hearing it. “Just breathe. In and out.”

Klaus breathed. It was difficult with his mouth taped. One of his nostrils was blocked—with blood or snot he wasn’t sure—forcing him to breathe slowly through the other, much more slowly than he’d like, whistling on each inhale.

“There you go,” Ben said. Klaus wanted to punch him.

“Fuck off,” he said, muffled by the tape but secure in the knowledge that Ben would understand him anyway. He knew that pointing his anger at Ben was pointing it entirely in the wrong direction, but he couldn’t help it. He was just angry, and the anger was a thousand times better than any of the other things roiling just beneath the surface.

“Hey,” Ben said mildly. “Glad you’re back with me but save your breath.”

Klaus swallowed and breathed. Beyond Ben, somewhere else in the room, Klaus realized that he could hear someone else speaking. It wasn’t one of the masks. It sounded like an old woman’s voice, maybe. Too low to properly make out the words. Whoever it was, she sounded pissed.

Klaus listened for a moment. When it didn’t go away, he tilted his head at Ben. Ben sighed and answered the unasked question. “Little old _babushka_. She’s been here for a few minutes. There’s more than just her actually. Guess you’re certified sober.”

Klaus groaned. He certainly felt disgustingly sober. A clear head was terrible even on a good day. But now, sleep-deprived and thirsty and hurting, the fact that he could vaguely think straight just left extra space for one big, ugly certainty:

“I’m gonna die,” he said behind the tape.

“No you’re not,” Ben said, fiercely.

“I am.” Somehow, he hadn’t really believed it before. But now, with the sour, shaky calm that was currently settled over the smoking ashes of his last tiny measure of nerves, it was pretty damn obvious. Dissociation was his go-to defense mechanism. He knew that. He had a childhood of experience to tell him that suffering eventually stops if he just sits back and endures it for long enough. So even if these people had guns and seemed like they’d tend towards murder-y if given the choice, he still hadn’t quite believed that they’d go all murder-y on _him_. Just goes to show that you never know what kind of optimism a guy might have rolling around in his head. He was never going to make it out alive. Hell, he should have started screaming the moment they took that tape off of his mouth.

“Klaus—” Ben said, but didn’t have anything to follow it.

“It’s okay,” Klaus said, and in that moment he did feel surprisingly okay with it. Everybody died—Klaus was in a position to know that better than most. _Everybody_ died. Ben had. So had Dad. Hell, Klaus had done it a couple of times, even if it hadn’t exactly stuck. It’s not like death was worth celebrating or anything, but if nothing else it was the official point at which a person got to stop worrying about the future. Things were very simple for the dead. “Doesn’t seem so bad.”

Ben was silent. Klaus assumed he was furious. Ben had exactly negative amounts of patience for that kind of talk. Always had. Klaus could picture the consternation on his face. That he was silent now and not cussing Klaus out was proof of just how shit things had gone. Instead, Ben was probably trying to come up with a convincing argument in favor of remaining calm and cool-headed.

Fuck that. Nobody was coming to help. He might as well just see how much shit he could start before he went down.

He dropped his chin to his chest. His right hand was useless at this point—it didn’t even really properly feel like a hand anymore; more like a bulky oven mitt that ached sharply, turned to broken glass on every heartbeat—but his left wasn’t doing so badly. It was only missing the nails of the ring and pinky fingers. The rest of it worked just fine. He tilted his head a little farther, toward his chest, head pounding, trying to catch the edge of the pillowcase with his first two fingers and thumb.

“Klaus,” Ben hissed. “Don’t.”

Klaus grunted and stretched a little more, and twisted his wrist against the tape, feeling it grip and pull against his clammy skin. His shoulders had been stuck in the same hunched position for a while now, and they protested this new stretch with the kind of concerning twanging noise that he was pretty sure Vanya’s violin strings made right before they snapped. He sat back to catch his breath.

“Don’t take that off.” Ben was hovering close again. “You heard what she said. Don’t give her an excuse to hurt you.”

Klaus shook his head. They’d hurt him no matter what. He leaned forward and reached again. Getting it off the first time had been pure luck, and he couldn’t see a thing but he could still tell that even stretched as far as he could go his grasping fingers weren’t going to reach the fabric. He gritted his teeth. He’d once managed to steal the entire top shelf of liquor while a bartender was turned around _and_ outran the guy without dropping a thing. He could get himself out of a fucking pillowcase.

“Stop it, Klaus,” Ben said. “You’re hurting yourself.”

Ben was right. It did hurt, and he was starting to get dizzy. He swore and sat back to catch his breath. He wondered if anybody had every suffocated because they had tape over their mouth. That would certainly be an interesting way to go.

He could still hear the old lady muttering. He spoke some Russian—and Spanish, and Mandarin, all thanks to Dear Old Dad, who had felt that a monolingual ghost-talker was a wasted opportunity—but not much. He was out of practice, and he’d been a shit student to begin with. And yet he was surprised to realize that he could understand her pretty well if he just focused on her voice. Even the unfamiliar words made some sense. Maybe it was the same part of his abilities that let Ben understand Klaus at even his least coherent.

He listened to her ramble for a bit. Something about masked bastards and revenge and a poor dead son. More sob story than he had the capacity to deal with at the moment. Klaus tuned her out.

“Who do you think was on the other end of that call?” Ben asked.

“Don’t know,” Klaus said.

“Maybe it was one of their bosses?”

“Don’t care,” Klaus specified.

“Seems like they’re desperate,” Ben said, ignoring him. “They could be getting shit from someone for taking too long.”

“Maybe it was the _babushka_.”

Ben ignored that too. “Maybe it was someone at the Academy.” He didn’t say that with a very hopeful tone—they both knew rescue might not be coming even if it _was_ one of the siblings. Klaus had run that well of goodwill dry years ago. “Or maybe it was Five.” That option was said with a slightly brighter, _He hasn’t had a chance to get tired of your bullshit_ kind of tone.

Klaus shook his head. “If they know his number, why bother asking me where he is?”

Ben seemed stumped by that one. They sat in a brief stretch of still silence, punctuated by Klaus’s laboring breaths, but then it wasn’t long before Klaus was fighting his bindings again, grunting and cursing as the tape tore at his skin.

“Seriously dude,” Ben said. “Quit it.”

“I just—” Klaus groaned and reached for the pillowcase again, stretching and twisting as far as he could. “If I can just—”

Ben sighed heavily. There was an unexpected touch on Klaus’s shoulder, and another on his head. The pillowcase was tugged gently up and away from his face, and then he was back in the bright room and the fresh air, and even with his hair plastered to his face with sweat, he could see.

Ben was crouched beside him. “I’m such an enabler,” he said as he tossed the pillowcase to the side. Then, face screwed up in concentration, he delicately reached up to grip one upturned corner of the tape over Klaus’s mouth. Much less delicately, he yanked it from Klaus’s face. Klaus yelped, shocked that such a small pain could still register, and then both he and Ben whipped their heads to look at the closed bathroom door. Nothing.

Klaus let out a shaky breath. “Thanks,” he whispered, or mouthed really. His voice crackled as he spoke. Clearing it didn’t improve much. Ben reached out and tried to push Klaus’s sweaty hair up out of his eyes, but his hand had again lost its substance and passed right through.

Klaus wheezed a laugh. “Everybody has performance issues sometimes.”

“Shut up,” Ben said, without any heat.

“You first.” Klaus couldn’t muster the energy to lift his head, so he glanced down at his hands. The right was an absolute horror show at this point. He looked away from it and wiggled his left wrist against the tape. “Maybe you could—?”

The whisper caught in his throat. Another figure, not Ben’s, had entered his vision. He looked up at it—a woman with bent shoulders and a wrinkled face, a great red stain in the scarf around her head.

Klaus shuddered and dropped his eyes. There were other ghosts in the room. He could see them, clustered randomly about, some staring at the closed bathroom door, others leaning against walls or sitting on the beds. The ones closest to him he could see were sporting the marks of violent deaths. Burned, shot, missing hands or parts of faces.

So many people. All victims of the masks, all drawn by Klaus’s power to haunt them in their shitty little motel room. He wondered what he would look like, in the end.

#

“So let me get this straight,” Diego said, twirling a thin blade between the fingers of one hand and rubbing at his aching temple with the other. He was a simple man. He was a guy with knives. He fought home invaders and muggings. He didn’t deal in death squads and time assassins. “They want to kill you because you defected. You defected to try and prevent the apocalypse. Which they’re mad about,” he paused, but continued, buoyed by Five’s grim nodding, “because they want the apocalypse to happen. And so they have Klaus, to lure you into a trap, which you know is a trap, so that they can kill you to make sure that you don’t keep trying to go back and—” he lost steam and ended with an uncertain, “—prevent the apocalypse?”

“I don’t see how that’s confusing,” Five said. He was drumming his fingers on the dash of Diego’s passenger seat, squinting through the windshield at the distant lights of the motel. He’d insisted they didn’t drive right up to it. Instead, he’d had them stop nearly a half mile down the road. Diego wasn’t sure what staring at it from this distance would do that was better than just not seeing the damn place at all, but he kept his doubts to himself. He was just a simple guy with knives. What did he know.

“When I kill them,” Five continued, somehow remaining conversational when discussing murder, “their organization just throws more agents into the timeline. I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve tried this, but who knows. Meanwhile, all they have to do is kill me once. Very frustrating, let me tell you.”

“So then what’s the point?” Diego asked.

Five looked at him. “Of what?”

“Of k—” The word caught in Diego’s mouth. He didn’t stutter much anymore, but it seemed that spending all this time with his siblings was bringing it back out in him. When he pictured the word in his head, it was accompanied by the odd memory of little Five back at the mansion, specks of someone else’s blood on his cheek. “Of _killing_ them. If they’re just going to send more.”

“You think I should give up?”

“I didn’t say that.” Stopping the apocalypse sounded pretty important. “Just doesn’t seem very sustainable.” And there was Klaus to think of—however the hell he fit into this. Five hadn’t specified. If Luther were here, he’d probably say that Klaus would sell them to the devil just for a hit of shit weed, but Diego doubted it. Knowing Klaus, if he did sell them out—which was at least a distinct possibility—he’d probably done it without really knowing the gravity of the situation.

“It doesn’t need to be sustainable.” The anger that had been hovering at the edge of Five’s voice drained out, and he was left sounding tired and way too old. “I just need to figure out how to break the loop.”

“Right.” Just that. “And that means we kill them for now.”

“Yep.”

“Yeah—” Diego scratched his head. “I gotta say, I’m not really comfortable with killing people just for something that they might do.”

Five raised an eyebrow at him, then said, “Call me old fashioned, but when someone hurts my family my morals tend to fly out the window.”

“Dude, Luther’s gonna be fine—” He paused, because Five was looking at him like he was an idiot. He thought about it. “Oh.” It all clicked: Five’s rage. The laughably under-planned plan. The massive first aid kit Five had told Pogo to put into the trunk. He was a complete idiot. “What have they done to Klaus?”

Five looked at him, then away again.

“They haven’t killed him.” Diego said it like it wasn’t a question, and he hoped to god it wasn’t.

Five looked at him again. “I doubt it,” he said. “They’ll want to use him as a distraction, or a bargaining chip. He’s worth less dead.”

“How do you know?” As he asked that question, the car and the trees around them sank abruptly into deeper shadow. A cloud had moved across the full moon.

If anything, Five looked more exhausted than ever. “It’s what I would have done.” In the space between breaths, he disappeared from the passenger seat and reappeared outside Diego’s door. He pulled it open, gave Diego a thin smile, then gestured in the direction of the motel. “Let’s go.”

#

“What are they doing?” Klaus whispered. He had a neck crick to end all neck cricks. Keeping his head down to avoid looking at the ghosts wasn’t helping. He wasn’t really sure what to do about it. Usually he’d down a forty or run away or some combination of the two. Sitting sober wasn’t really part of his playbook.

“They’re staring at you,” Ben said.

Klaus groaned. “Make them stop.”

Ben shrugged. He was sitting on the floor at Klaus’s side, chin resting on his knees. He’d given up trying to pick at the tape on Klaus’s wrists. Whatever the perfect combo was of their emotions or strength or need that enabled him to manifest, it was no longer clicking. He just kept passing right through. He’d briefly gotten so frustrated that he’d started pacing and tearing at his own hair until Klaus begged him to cut it out. “You know they won’t give a damn what I have to say. They want to talk to you.”

It was true. On several occasions in the past, Ben had tried to interact with other ghosts on Klaus’s behalf, but he couldn’t touch them, and they either couldn’t see him or just didn’t give a shit what he had to say.

“Well I don’t want to talk to them,” Klaus said. “What’s happening with the masks?” He hadn’t heard a peep from them since they disappeared back into the bathroom. The light coming from beneath the bathroom door hadn’t even shifted.

Ben sighed. “They can’t have gone anywhere else. The window in there is tiny. And I think you should talk to them.”

Klaus wasn’t exactly at the top of his cognitive game—it seemed that sobriety didn’t really tip the scales that far when it had thirst and pain and random bouts of withdrawal shakes to contend with. His teeth chattered as he said tentatively, “The masks?”

“The ghosts,” Ben said patiently. “They might know something useful.”

“I don’t—” Klaus started to say, but cut himself off with a noise that could only be described as an _eep_ as a long-nailed, wrinkled hand entered his vision. He jerked and pulled as far as he could away from it, but the hand followed and reached for his face. “Don’t,” he said as those fingernails loomed in his vision, but the hand just lifted higher and moved as if to touch his hair. It passed through without touching him.

“ _Poor boy_ ,” the old woman said in soft Russian. She was close to him now, standing on Klaus’s other side, opposite Ben.

Klaus looked wildly at Ben, who just sat back and tilted his head encouragingly. Klaus scowled, and then swallowed and looked up into the woman’s wrinkled little face, meeting her pale, stern eyes. “Uh, hi,” he whispered. “Hello.”

She stared at him, incorporeal but still uncomfortably close. There was blood under her nose, and mud along the front of her heavy coat.

He swallowed again. He had a split in his lower lip. It stung as he tried, “What’s your name?”

“Ana Popova,” she said. She sounded a little indignant, as if he should have already known that.

“Ana Popova,” he repeated. Names were important, to both the living and the dead. Klaus knew that, and said her name softly, afraid to give too much weight to it. “What are you doing here, Ana?”

She, if anything, looked more stern. “ _He killed me.”_

“The man in the mask?” Klaus said. A sharp nod. He looked around at the ghosts, making himself at least glance at their faces even if he couldn’t meet their eyes. “How many of you did he kill?” A little less than half of the room raised their hands. “And the woman?” The rest held up hands or stumps.

“Cha Cha.” Another voice, this one belonging to a woman with a pale face and shimmering robes covered in blood. She spoke, even with the clean cut through her throat. She was sitting primly on one of the beds, one ankle tucked neatly behind the other. “She’ll kill you soon.”

Klaus opened his mouth, but didn’t have anything to say to that, and so he shut it again.

“You could kill them first,” another one said. He looked a bit like a guy Klaus used to buy E from. Except he didn’t have any hands. Just bloodied, mashed-looking stumps. “I didn’t stand a chance. But you’ve got some powers.” Others around him were nodding. Ben was too.

Klaus shook his head right back at them. “I can’t do shit,” he hissed.

“Klaus,” Ben warned, a moment before the bathroom doorknob rattled. Klaus’s throat closed. He held very still as the door swung open and the man trudged into the room.

The man—Hazel, Cha Cha had said, Klaus was pretty sure—wasn’t wearing his mask anymore. He had a broad, open face that, under different circumstances, Klaus might have thought looked friendly. He even had smile lines. As it was, it took every ounce of Klaus’s willpower not to completely hyperventilate as he approached.

Hazel didn’t get close to him, though. He walked past Klaus, to the open suitcase on the bed, unaware of the crowd of angry eyes that shifted and pressed in around him. After a moment of digging, Hazel paused and turned back toward Klaus. “Shouldn’t you have a blindfold?” His eyes drifted to the tape and pillowcase, both of which were on the floor several feet away, where Ben had tossed them, and then to Klaus’s still-taped wrists. He raised his eyebrows.

Klaus shrugged.

“Huh,” Hazel said. He turned back to his suitcase and then reemerged with a massive military-looking gun in one hand and a broad-handled knife with a short, spike-like blade in the other.

“I told her,” Hazel continued, slinging the rifle’s strap across his shoulders, “I told her I didn’t think you seemed telekinetic. And I definitely felt like I was fighting something a bit ago. Someone, I mean. Nothing but a fist could’ve done this, and I—” He’d turned to show Klaus the developing bruise that Ben had left on his jaw, but cut off at Klaus’s expression. He tucked the knife into a sheath and hooked it onto the holster that stretched across his chest beneath his suit jacket. “Oh, these aren’t for you.”

“Who are they for?” Klaus asked.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Did I say I was worried?” Klaus said. Hazel laughed at that. Klaus pressed his luck. “What do you need me for?”

Hazel seemed to be considering whether he wanted to answer Klaus’s question, then shook his head ruefully and said, “Not for talking, that’s for sure,” and casually slugged Klaus in the stomach. Klaus coughed and heaved and the ghosts hissed their disapproval—“That’s how Houdini died, you know,” a bespectacled teenager added helpfully—and grabbed the back of Klaus’s chair in one hand. He dragged it across the carpet and turned it around to face the door.

He paused mid-drag to switch his grip, grimacing and flexing his hand as if it hurt him. “I swear to god, I’m filing a complaint,” Hazel muttered shifting the chair within the entryway as if trying to set up the optimal angle for a camera. “‘Bigger forces at work, my ass. Just a fucking cog in the machine, that’s me. You know,” he told Klaus, shifting him again and then apologizing distractedly when he jostled Klaus’s broken hand and Klaus doubled over again. “In any other industry, this would be grounds for workers comp. I had to buy my own wrist brace for god’s sake.”

“He’s definitely got some kind of stick up his ass,” Ben said. He was up close and face to face with Hazel now, inspecting the bruised jaw with some amount of satisfaction. “Wonder if it’s just you that triggered it, or if there’s something else.”

“Definitely not just about me,” Klaus said, fresh sweat pouring down his face as he struggled not to puke again.

“What’d you say?” Hazel said. He’d stopped moving Klaus around and was now pushing around the furniture in the rest of the room. There didn’t seem to be any logic to the arrangement that Klaus could see.

Klaus managed to unstick his voice from his throat. “Does the name Ana Popova mean anything to you?”Ana, who was standing right in front of the big man and staring up at him with her big indignant eyes, blinked owlishly.

Hazel blinked. He pursed his lips, as if he were actually thinking about it, then said, “Nope.”

Ana practically swelled in her rage. Over by the door, Ben cleared his throat and said, “Do you hear gunshots?”

#

Five, as it turned out, was several times more chaotic in a fight than Diego knew how to keep up with. And that was saying something—Eudora had once compared Diego to the dogs at the K9 academy. Not just one of the dogs, she’d been careful to specify, but the entire academy.

“Should’ve known,” Diego muttered as he watched Five move from target to target, popping out of existence and reappearing at necks and backs, expertly driving what appeared to be a steak knife into the spaces between body armor.

Somehow, Diego had seen Five’s normal-day clothes and lack of gun and assumed they were going to try to do things at least semi-quietly. They hadn’t even seen their cartoon-masked kidnappers yet. The moment they’d gotten close to the motel, they’d started running into people dressed in black tactical gear and toting ludicrously high-caliber guns that they seemed to have no qualms about using. Diego wondered if there was anybody else in the motel. There were certainly other cars in the parking lot. He hoped any civilians had the good sense to make themselves scarce.

His ears and head and chest pulsing with the clamor of gunfire, Diego followed several steps behind Five, watching the kid’s back and picking off anyone the kid missed. He soon ran out of knives and had to start stooping at bodies and retrieving the knives he’d already thrown. Ridiculous. One of the reasons he'd left the Academy gig was because of these exact kinds of situations. He was pretty sure killing this many people wasn’t super great for his mental health. Which, while seriously neglected in comparison to his physical health, he did care about at least in theory.

“Hey Five,” he said in a brief lull. The two of them were crouched between cars, protected on both sides by what had quickly become a wall of armored bodies. Now that they’d cleared the ground level, it seemed that more attackers were flooding in from the upper levels and roof, and Five was watching them gather with calculating eyes. His forehead and upper lip were shining in the low light with sweat.

Diego said his name again. “Five. Where are we going?”

Five broke his stare, looked at Diego, and then shook his head and squinted around the motel. The building was entirely dark. Diego would guess that there were at least fifty rooms. It would be a pain in the ass to check them all, especially with armed para-military assholes on their backs.

The kid looked almost as frustrated as Diego felt. “We could go to the lobby and check the room list.” He looked doubtful even as he said it, and then popped away and reappeared behind a figure that had just crested the edge of the roof. This time, Five didn’t quite get the guy in one hit, and they engaged for a second before the body tumbled to the ground.

Five reappeared at Diego’s side. There was a fresh cut on his cheek. He looked winded.

Something bumped Diego’s shoulder. He whirled, knife poised to throw, but there was nobody there. Just an empty stretch of parking lot. “What—” he said, and then caught a glimpse of movement in the curtains in one of the upper floor rooms. Five followed the look, then nodded grimly and made an _after you_ motion.

It was proof of Five’s exhaustion that he actually took the stairs with Diego, falling a step behind on his shorter legs, toting a gun that he’d picked off one of the bodies.

Diego paused at the top. “You okay?” He knew Five wasn’t going to get an answer on that one, so he jerked his head at the gun instead. “You know how to use that?”

Five rolled his eyes and pushed past him. Diego grinned and followed, hugging the wall, ready for more bullets. Instead, they found only an empty walkway and a row of dark doors and windows stretching in both directions.

“This can’t be right,” Diego said. He paused halfway out of the stairwell and automatically catching Five’s shoulder to pull him back into the meager protection of the walls.

Five shrugged him off. “The soldiers were just to distract us,” he said, voice low. He peered around the cement wall, then stepped into the walkway again. “Tire us out.”

“This seems like a trap,” Diego said, though he followed Five anyway and sighed when Five responded with a mild, “Yep.”

They approached the motel room doorway in silence. Diego automatically reached for the handle, but paused when Five threw out an arm and hissed, “Could be rigged.”

Diego held up his hands and stood back to let the kid inspect the doorframe. While Five was busy doing that, Diego tried looking past the curtains in the window. The room’s interior was dark. He thought maybe he saw someone or something moving inside. He squinted, trying to make it out, and then gasped when something solid bumped his shoulder again. It wasn’t a violent bump—more like the kind of nudge of a friend trying to get his attention—and when he turned to look there was once again nothing there. But then he raised his eyes and saw the woman standing at the end of the walkway. He thought he maybe recognized her suit, but didn’t know her face. He definitely recognized the massive gun in her hands.

“Five—” Diego said, then grunted as an invisible something shoved him hard enough to knock him flat on his ass. A volley of bullets whizzed over his head. Five looked up from the door, and then in the next breath he was across the walkway at the woman’s back. But he wasn’t as quick as he’d been when they started, and she was nearly a blur herself as she drove an elbow into him, knocking his smaller body backward and sending the gun flying from his grip. He rolled with the motion and caught her leg.

They both hit the ground. She yelped as her back hit the metal railing, and swung the gun’s muzzle around toward Five, but he was already on her other side. His knee connected solidly with the side of her head. She fell back but caught his ankle and yanked it, sending him sprawling.

“Shit,” Diego said, at the very audible _thunk_ of Five’s head against the ground. He loosed his last knife.

It struck true. Right in the center of her chest. She fell back abruptly, and then didn’t get back up.

Five scrambled to his feet, then wavered and had to steady himself against the wall. He flashed Diego a weak thumbs-up, and Diego decided that he was more than a little tired of being out in the open, so he turned and kicked in the motel room door. It swung inward on creaking hinges and juddered against the wall behind it with a hollow _bang_. Diego marched inside, but slowed as he stepped inside.

The room was dark. It looked like a regular motel room, except the furniture was oddly arranged with the table on its side and both beds clustered against the far side of the room. It stank like stress-sweat and sickness and blood. The television was on, set to static, casting sharp, odd shadows across the room and on the walls. And there was a chair, with a very still and bare body slumped on it, centered directly in the meager light that spilled in through the door.

“Klaus?” Diego managed, the name escaping him like a gutpunch in the same moment that the body on the chair croaked, “Watch out—”

Diego tore his gaze away just as a bullet thunked into his chest, followed a split second later by the sound of the gunshot. Diego staggered back a step. Something moved behind the makeshift barricade of tables and chairs. More bullets followed, Diego felt like he was moving in slow motion, but then something caught his shoulder and hooked his leg, and he crashed to the ground by Klaus’s bare feet.

A massive shadow rose from behind Klaus. Again, Diego didn’t recognize the man’s face, but he recognized the suit, and the gun, and he scrabbled for something to throw. His fingers met nothing but threadbare carpet, and he swore. The rifle’s sights settled on him, and while his suit might be lined in kevlar, his face sure as hell wasn’t. Diego threw up a hand, as if that might actually do anything.

The muzzle flashed, Diego’s eyes snapped shut and waited for the impact—

—but nothing hit him.

He forced his eyes open again, and it seemed for a moment as if he had been transported somewhere else entirely. The room was impossibly bright and, absurdly, packed wall to wall with people. A crowd of them.

Diego gaped, taking in strange clothes, ghastly mutilations, all kinds of people, all outlined in shining blue light. And then, more bizarre than any of that, was the blue-rimmed form standing over him, holding a bullet in their palm as if they’d just snatched it from the air while it was on its way to Diego’s head.

“What—” Diego said. He blinked to clear his eyes, but abruptly the room was dark and empty again. No sign of the milling crowd, the blue lights, or the bullet-catching savior. Diego might almost have thought he hallucinated it, but then the barricading table and bed clattered aside as if thrown by massive force. A moment later, the big man’s head snapped back. His nose erupted in blood.

He yelled and lashed out. It almost seemed like he managed to hit something solid, too, but more things were hitting him now, knocking him backward, wrestling the gun from his hands.

Diego looked up at Klaus, who was glowing a little bit himself. Klaus had his head turned to watch as invisible assailants wrestled the big man to the ground. Klaus’s face was shining with sweat, and he seemed to be focusing very hard, unblinking as the man thrashed beneath the pinning force of what had to be multiple people—Diego could even see the indents of hands and fingers in the fabric of his suit jacket.

The man reared up with herculean effort, then fell back as something started hitting him, repeatedly, snapping his head to the side with each blow. Diego had been in enough streetfights to picture someone sitting on the guy’s chest and beating his face in with their fists.

Five came to stand next to Diego. Looking completely unsurprised by this new turn of events, he wordlessly held out a hand to help Diego up, and then said with steely calm, “Klaus. I need him alive.” When Klaus didn’t immediately respond, he said a little louder, “Klaus.”

The smacking of fist against face stopped. He squinted at Five for a long, inscrutable moment, then tilted his head at the thoroughly unconscious man. Klaus lost the luminous glow. He sat back in the chair and looked away.

“Thank you,” Five said. He reached out as if to touch Klaus’s face or something, then withdrew and swiped a roll of tape from a small spread of tools on the tv stand. He marched over to bind the man’s hands.

Diego watched Five for a moment, waiting to see if the big guy would try to get back up. When he didn’t, Diego reached over to finally flick on the damn lights and moved to go see about Klaus.

“Hey, man,” he said, and crouched down beside him. It was an effort to keep his voice steady—because while they hadn’t been immediately apparent before, in this fresh light he could see that Klaus’s body was covered with marks. Fresh wounds, none of them life-threatening, scattered across the tender parts of the body that could cause a lot of pain without a lot of damage—the belly, the feet, the inner arms. Diego didn’t need to be a genius to know how Klaus got them.

“Hey,” Klaus said. His eyes were fever-bright, and when they focused on Diego, looked more than a little crazed. After a moment, he said, very clearly, “You guys are— _really_ bad at rescue missions.” He glanced to the side, as if he were listening to someone else speak, then said, “They are. Like, _so_ bad. How the hell do two _actual_ superheroes fuck up so badly that I need to call in the goddamn ghost posse to save all of our asses?” His voice crackled from strain as he said, with venom, “Where the fuck could you possibly have been for the past fucking day and a half? Did you guys even know I was gone?”

Diego swallowed. He didn’t know what to say to that. Klaus squeezed his eyes shut. Diego said his name and reached out. Klaus looked at him. He didn’t pull away. Diego touched Klaus’s face. Wiped at one of the tear tracks running down his cheek. “I’m sorry we’re late,” he said.

“Fuck,” Klaus said, the word visceral, like he was expelling something from his gut by saying it. He finally broke his wild stare and let his head drop heavily to Diego’s shoulder. “Fuck, I’m so glad you’re here.” It was hard to tell if he was looking for comfort or offering forgiveness or if he was just that exhausted and would have slumped against anything sturdy and within reach. Diego wrapped his arms around him anyway, careful not to press too hard anywhere.

With Klaus leaning against him, Diego could see that his upper back and shoulders were just as littered with cuts and burns. And in the light, he realized that Klaus was only wearing a towel—one of the towels from the mansion. Monogrammed with Dad’s initials. Just a blood-stained towel.

“Are we completely sure we’re not gonna kill this guy?” Diego said, striving for calm.

Five, who had left the man taped on the floor and was now rummaging through the room, looking in corners and under beds. “Might be able to bargain,” he said curtly. “If that doesn’t work, then have at it.”

“Okay,” Diego said. He looked back down at Klaus. “Still with me?”

Klaus nodded, forehead heavy against Diego’s chest. Then, he stiffened and said, “Wait, the woman. She’s still in the bathroom. She—”

Diego shushed him. “Lady in the suit’s dead.”

“We sure?”

“Her body’s right out front.”

Klaus closed his eyes and took a long, slow breath. “Thank fucking god.” He opened them again after a few more breaths, and then said, “When I go to hell, I swear that bitch is gonna be running the place.”

“That bad?”

“Worse.” He lifted the fingers on one of his bound hands. “Can you—?”

“Yeah, totally,” Diego said. He disentangled himself and gingerly set Klaus back against the chair’s backrest. He found a small penknife among the tools on the tv stand. It had dried blood in the grooves of the handle, and Diego tried not to think about that too much as he grabbed it and turned back to Klaus.

Klaus had dropped his head back now and was blinking blearily at the ceiling, tensing against odd, twitching shivers that rattled his sweaty frame. There was something horribly wrong with his right hand. Diego reached for the left instead, but when his gloved fingers touched the back of Klaus’s wrist, Klaus jerked, his hand curling into a protective fist around a wide burn that Diego was just noticing on his palm. Several of his fingers had crusted scabs where the nails ought to be.

Diego looked away and pictured the word _calm_ in his mind. It looked a lot like his knife buried in someone’s throat. He didn’t remove his light touch from Klaus’s wrist. “I’m just cutting the tape off,” he said, as gently as he knew how. “That’s it.” On instinct, he briefly drew back to peel his gloves off of, and then reached out again. Klaus watched him with a kind of detached anxiety, but he didn’t pull away this time when Diego brought the knife close and began to saw at the tape.

As soon as it was cut through, Klaus twisted his wrist free, revealing a stark ring of raw skin and bruising. He brought his shaky hand up to rub at his nose, his eyes, and then pushed his sweat-soaked hair up and out of his face. After that, he didn’t seem to know what to do with it and instead rested it anxiously against his own chest.

“You hurt anywhere major?” Diego asked. He worked the blade against the tape on the right wrist as gently as he could, aware that even the minor jostling must be agonizing.

Klaus shook his head. His teeth were chattering again.

“You detoxing?” Diego said.

Klaus huffed. “We’re way past that, big D. Keep up.”

 _The ghosts,_ Diego wanted to say. He had so many questions, but now wasn’t the time. He opened his mouth to say something else, but Five piped up in one of the corners.

“Found it!” Five called. He held up a sturdy-looking suitcase, his small body radiating triumph.

Diego frowned. “Are we robbing them?”

“Yep,” Five said. He marched over to the man on the ground, kicked him, and then said, “Little bit of luck, and we might not have to fight our way out of here,” he said, and with that said he opened the suitcase and he and the unconscious man disappeared in a flash of blue light.

Diego looked at Klaus. “That kid. I swear.”

Klaus, meanwhile, frowned at the empty room.

“Why’re you still here?” Klaus said. Diego opened his mouth but Klaus shook his head. “Not you. Why are you here?” He said that to an empty patch of room. “Yeah, but the other guys are gone with the big guy,” he said, answering some unknown question. Abruptly, he turned to Diego, injured hand cradled protectively against his chest now that it was free. “The woman's ghosts are still here,” Klaus said. “So she must be nearby.”

Diego shook his head. “She’s dead. We killed her.”

Klaus blinked at him. “They’re still here,” he said again. “So she’s still here.”

Diego searched his face, then stood and walked to the door. He poked his head out cautiously, ready for a gun to the face, but the walkway was empty. Disturbingly empty, in fact. The woman’s body was nowhere to be seen. Just a pool of blood that was already starting to dry on the cement.

“ _Shit_ ,” Diego said. “You’re right. She’s—” He pulled his head back into the room and drew up short.

The woman was there, a gun in one hand, her other arm wrapped around Klaus’s neck. The end of Diego’s knife was still sticking out of her chest like an absurd lapel pin. Her rattling breaths filled the room. Klaus’s good hand was on her arm, and as Diego watched Klaus yanked down on her elbow and bit down hard on her gloved hand. She snarled and wrenched his head back until his jaw loosened and she could pull her hand free. She twisted the hand instead into Klaus’s hair and pushed the gun against him with enough force to dent the skin of his cheek.

“Hold on," Diego said. “Let's just—”

She placed her finger carefully on the trigger. Diego put his hands up. He still had the penknife. He rolled it between his fingers as he stepped into the room.

“Don’t come closer,” the woman hissed, and he stopped. “Where’s the suitcase?”

“Gone,” Diego said.

Her expression didn’t change. “Better make sure it gets un-gone.”

Diego didn’t have the first idea of how he’d do that. He silently cursed Five and said, carefully, “Okay, let’s just see if we can—”

Klaus cut him off. “Just shoot her,” he said, surprisingly firm.

The woman released Klaus’s hair and instead snatched his broken hand from where he had it cradled against his chest. Klaus’s face twisted. He tried to pull his hand back, but she gripped it like she was giving him a particularly firm handshake and he collapsed in on himself without a sound. Her gun followed him smoothly, never disconnecting from his head.

“You can get me the suitcase,” she said.

Diego tasted blood. Mechanically, he unclenched his teeth from his tongue.

“Well?” she said. She twisted her hold on Klaus’s hand. Klaus jerked, but otherwise kept his face buried against his knees, his arm limp in her grip, unwilling or unable to try and pull away now. His other hand was clenching and unclenching against his head.

Diego opened his mouth to say something—he didn’t know what. Try to bluff somehow, maybe—but then there was another flash of blue light in the corner. Five reappeared, suitcase in hand.

She shifted to look, and that was all Diego needed. He threw the penknife, hoping to god her hellish reaction time had slowed a bit. The blade hit connected with her trigger finger, severing it cleanly at the knuckle and sending the gun spinning off to the side. She shrieked. The gun spun to a stop at the feet of someone who definitely hadn’t been standing there just a second before—a spirit, ringed in blue.

As the spirit scooped the gun from the ground, the woman, still screaming, reached up and yanked the knife that sat deep in her chest and brought it down to Klaus’s neck. The spirit, holding it with careful hands and furious concentration, as if expecting it to disappear at any moment, brought the muzzle down with her, and just as the blade met with Klaus’s throat, the spirit shot her through the neck.

She gasped, staggered. Dropped her knife. Blood spilled down her chest. For a moment, she wavered, and then the spirit pulled the trigger again and she dropped to the ground, a hole right through her temples.

The spirit looked at them. He grinned, and then disappeared. The gun clattered to the ground beside the woman’s body.

Diego looked at Klaus, then Five, and then said, “Was that fucking Ben?”

#

It turned out that there are a lot of things to sort out after being involved in a shootout and hostage negotiation. Diego called Eudora and then spent an obnoxious amount of time running interference with the police. Five explained that he’d met with some handler or something and “bought them some time,” whatever that meant.

Klaus, finally free of the terrible chair, lay on his back on one of the beds, stared up at the ceiling, and waited for his shoulders to stop screaming from the change in position. He refused to let the EMTs near him, nearly started screaming at them even though he really didn’t mean to. They negotiated, and he let them at least give him water and some kind of painkiller. It wasn’t an opiate or anything, disappointingly, but still it seemed to help a bit.

After a bit, Five came to sit on the bed next to Klaus. He apologized. Klaus wasn’t sure what for exactly, but he was sure someone would explain it to him later. Either way, Klaus told him to fuck off and then cried again, one hand covering his face. Five just pulled out a little first aid kit and started quietly cleaning and wrapping some of the cuts on Klaus’s shoulders.

Klaus was almost asleep when they were cleared to leave. Rather than seeing if he could manage the walk, Diego just picked him up and carried him down the stairs.

In the backseat of Diego’s car, Klaus didn’t have enough energy to sit gingerly, so the cuts on his back and legs just ached where they pressed against the seat and the blanket wrapped around him.

Diego settled into the front seat and brought the engine sputtering to life. He looked over at Five, then turned to look at Klaus. “We all set?” He asked. “Is, uh, Ben here?”

”Yep,” Klaus said. Ben wasn’t yet, actually, but Klaus didn’t bother to try and explain that it didn’t really work that way—Ben was never going to need them to wait for him.

Ben settled into the seat beside him. Ever since he’d taken the gun in his hands and pulled the trigger, he’d been quiet. More than once, Klaus had noticed him staring at the thin line on Klaus’s neck where the woman’s knife had just started to cut.

Klaus reached out to touch the back of Ben’s hand, surprised to find it solid and warm. Ben’s hard expression softened, and when Klaus took his hand he returned the pressure.

“Huh,” Klaus said. He slowly lowered his head to Ben’s shoulder, and that was solid too, and neither of them even had to do a thing to make it happen. His aching face soothed by the cool, plush leather of Ben’s jacket, he murmured, “That was easy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for dealing with the long wait! And thank you all for the lovely comments and encouragements! Each and every one of them made my day.
> 
> Hope you guys enjoyed! As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments!


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